The Senate committee report says that President Trump may have had a relationship with a Russian beauty pageant winner. But investigators say they “did not establish” that Russia had compromising information on Mr. Trump.
Two decades before he ran for president, Donald J. Trump traveled to Russia, where he scouted properties, was wined and dined and, of greatest significance to Senate intelligence investigators, met a woman who was a former Miss Moscow.
A Trump associate, Robert Curran, who was interviewed by the Senate investigators, said he believed Mr. Trump may have had a romantic relationship with the woman. On the same trip, another Trump associate, Leon D. Black, told investigators that he and Mr. Trump “might have been in a strip club together.” Another witness said that Mr. Trump may have been with other women in Moscow and later brought them along to a meeting with the mayor.
Mr. Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time.
Mr. Curran is an American photographer whose work hung in Mr. Trump’s SoHo hotel. Mr. Black is a founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management.
The allegations about Mr. Trump were included in the fifth and final volume of a bipartisan report released on Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which presented potentially compromising information that the Russians may have on Mr. Trump and could use against him as leverage.
But at the same time, the committee cast some doubt on the significance of the allegations, saying investigators “did not establish” that the Russian government actually had compromising information on Mr. Trump. The report also said there was no evidence the Russians had sought to blackmail Mr. Trump or others working for his 2016 presidential campaign.
The report justified the inclusion of the salacious details about the president as necessary to understand the threat of a possible foreign influence operation or whether misinformation was spreading that could harm the American political process. The details were in a section of the report about the Russian art of “kompromat,” or disseminating damaging information to discredit a rival or an enemy, which can pose a national security threat by targeting American officials.
Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that he wanted to let the section about whether Mr. Trump was potentially compromised by the Russians speak for itself.
“On that subject, I would simply say Americans should read the report and make their own conclusions,” Mr. Warner said.
The White House denounced the report on Tuesday. “After a special counsel, numerous other committee investigations and four prior reports from this committee, the Senate intelligence report affirms what we have known for years. There was absolutely no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. Mr. Deere called the report part of “a never-ending, baseless conspiracy theory peddled by radical liberals and their partners in the media.’’
There are longstanding questions about the president’s affinity for Russia, which intervened in the 2016 campaign to help Mr. Trump, according to American intelligence agencies, a special counsel investigation and the current Senate Intelligence Committee report. Mr. Trump has called it all a hoax, publicly accepted President Vladimir V. Putin’s word that Russia did not interfere and pushed policies helpful to Mr. Putin and his government.
This month, Mr. Trump rejected warnings from the American intelligence agencies that Russia is trying to help him win re-election in 2020.
“Collectively, the allegations raised a potential counterintelligence concern, that Russia might use compromising information to influence the then-presidential candidate’s positions on relations with Russia,” the report said. “The committee sought, in a limited way, to understand the Russian government’s alleged collection of such information, not only because of the threat of a potential foreign influence operation, but also to explore the possibility of a misinformation operation targeting the integrity of the U.S. political process.”
The report released Tuesday provided one of the most detailed official accounts of Mr. Trump’s time in Russia. Over dozens of pages in the nearly 1,000-page document, the report said that a Marriott executive told committee investigators that after Mr. Trump traveled to Russia in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant the executive overheard two colleagues who worked at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow discussing video footage that they said showed Mr. Trump with women in an elevator at the hotel.
Similar accusations have arisen before. A dossier of largely unverified information compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia claimed that during Mr. Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow there was video of him with prostitutes in his Ritz-Carlton hotel room. A person Mr. Steele relied on for that information later told the F.B.I. that the allegation was just a rumor he was passing along.
The Ritz-Carlton, the Senate report said, is a “high counterintelligence risk environment” that has “at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, government surveillance of guests’ rooms and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities.”
The Marriott executive told the committee that one of the colleagues he overheard discussing the footage from the Ritz-Carlton said the video showed Mr. Trump “with several women” in the elevator, whom the colleague “implied to be ‘hostesses.’”
The executive said that the colleagues were discussing how to deal with the recording. But as they went back and forth about the matter, they moved to a more private place where it was more difficult to hear the conversation.
The committee interviewed the two colleagues who said they did not recall seeing the recording.
“The committee was not able to resolve these discrepancies,” the report said.
The report also said that a Trump associate, David Geovanis, an American businessman based in Russia who was in Moscow for the 1996 visit, continued to discuss Mr. Trump’s relationship with the former Miss Moscow after the president’s inauguration in 2017. According to the committee report, Mr. Curran, the photographer and a friend of Mr. Geovanis, told Senate investigators that he had asked Mr. Geovanis, “What exactly happened … did they hook up, or whatever?’’
Mr. Geovanis responded, Mr. Curran told the investigators, with “Yeah, well, I saw them again the next day and they were together, so.”
